Return of the Prodigal Son

Early in Marilynne Robinson’s “Gilead,” one of the few recent American novels that have found and deserved both critical praise and readerly love, the narrator, the Rev. John Ames, admits that he has a tendency “to overuse the word ‘old.’ ” This habit, he muses, “has less to do with age . . . than it does with familiarity. It sets a thing apart as something regarded with a modest, habitual affection. Sometimes it suggests haplessness or vulnerability. I say ‘old Boughton,’ I say ‘this shabby old town,’ and I mean that they are very near my heart.”

Ames, an important figure in Robinson’s new novel, “Home,” is also, at least in this passage, allowing his creator to speak through him, and to acknowledge with some slyness a tic of her own remarkable literary style. If anything, the word “old” pops up even more frequently in “Home” — a third-person retelling of many of the events in “Gilead” seen through the eyes of 38-year-old Glory Boughton — than it did in the earlier book. Its meanings are complex, at times contradictory. Robinson uses “old,” as Ames did, to refer to people, places and objects that are dear and intimately known — including Ames himself, well into his 70s in 1956, when both novels take place. The word also suits Robert Boughton — usually called “the old man” — a fellow minister who has been Ames’s friend since childhood. Boughton’s faltering health has brought Glory, the youngest of his eight children and recently abandoned by a no-account fiancé, home to Gilead, Iowa. The big, vine-covered house, in Glory’s childhood an emblem of the family’s prosperity and fertility, holds on to the ghost of its former vitality. “The furniture and the damage done to it in the course of the old robust domestic life were all still there,” she observes. “And the old books.”

Old life, old books, old habits. Glory seems to settle into a world as worn and comfortable as the title of the book. But for her, and for Robinson, what is near and dear — an older brother, say, or a scrap of textbook history, or home itself — can also be unaccountably mysterious, even uncanny. “What a strange old book it was,” Glory thinks as she reads the Bible, a daily practice she maintains partly to keep some connection to that “old life” of habitual piety she knew growing up in a minister’s household, and partly out of a deeper religious feeling. (“Faith for her was habit and family loyalty, a reverence for the Bible which was also literary, admiration for her mother and father. And then that thrilling quiet of which she had never felt any need to speak.”) Surely she knows the book backward and forward, but she discovers that still it has the power to haunt and surprise. “I will open my mouth in a parable,” she reads, “I will utter dark sayings of old, which we have heard and known, and our fathers have told us.”

A clue to the intentions behind both “Home” and “Gilead” — which do not coexist in a relation of chronological sequence or thematic priority, but instead turn together like enmeshed gears impelling a single narrative machine — may lie in that passage from the 78th Psalm. It suggests that familiar stories and pieces of wisdom can nonetheless be obscure, even sinister or magical, in their lessons and meanings. And it is a characteristic of Robinson’s prose to proceed with self-evident clarity and simplicity while seeming at the same time pregnant with troubling implications. Most of what might be called the action in “Home” consists of the movements of a few characters — Glory, her father and her brother Jack — around their grand old house, from kitchen to living room, from garden to porch. They speak with sometimes strained politeness as they busy themselves with mundane domestic tasks. But those quotidian facts of what Glory thinks of as “difficult, ordinary life” feel, in Robinson’s hand, like vessels of the terrible, the sublime, the miraculous.

While she attends, with tact and precision, to sensual details, the pieces of language Robinson cherishes most are the kind of sturdy, everyday abstractions you might ponder in church. She is somehow able to infuse what can sound like dowdy, common words — words like courtesy and kindness, shame and forgiveness, transgression and grace — with a startling measure of their old luster and gravity. Phrases many of us have heard and known since childhood come in her hands to have the depth of dark sayings, and her parable of a family’s partial restoration is also a story to trouble your sleep and afflict your conscience.

Boughton and Ames grew up together at the end of the 19th century in Gilead and followed their own fathers into the ministry there, clinging to adjacent branches of the sturdy tree of Puritan tradition. Boughton, whose forebears arrived from Scotland just after the American Civil War, tended to Gilead’s Presbyterian flock, while Ames, grandson of a visionary abolitionist from Maine, looked after the souls of the local Congregationalists. Their denominations separated (as Robinson has written elsewhere) by a “doctrinal and demographic inch,” the two preachers served each other as theological sparring partners, combatants across the checkerboard and spiritual counselors in good times and bad. As a measure of their mutual affection, each gave the other a namesake. Ames’s young son, born in the twilight of his father’s life, is named Robby. (“Gilead” is addressed to him.) The black sheep of Boughton’s large brood — four boys and four girls — is John Ames Boughton, better known as Jack, who calls his own father “sir” and keeps “papa” as his sardonic sobriquet for Ames.

“Gilead” and “Home” stand together, in part, as twinned portraits of these godly, elderly patriarchs, whose intimations of encroaching mortality are disrupted by Jack’s return home to Gilead after 20 years away. And some of the appeal of the books surely lies in the nostalgic coloring Robinson imparts to the small-town Middle West of a half-century ago. There are pancakes in the morning and chicken and dumplings for Sunday dinner. The local grocer makes deliveries. A battered DeSoto sits in what used to be the Boughton’s horse barn, and television is enough of a novelty that it can safely be ignored most of the time. For entertainment, there are hymns at the piano, with an occasional selection from the American songbook thrown in to add a note of slightly scandalous variety. The mainline Protestant churches are in full vigor, and if one old minister leans toward Eisenhower in the coming election while his “alter ego” prefers Stevenson, that seems more a matter of temperament and habit than a sign of serious ideological division.

What could be more soothing, amid the racket and contention of our present moment, than the company of a pair of old-timers living in what we might be inclined to think of as the good old days? And the comforts of “Home,” the balm in “Gilead,” are real enough. But even as Robinson’s deep and unsentimental fondness for Ames and Boughton is as evident as their devotion to each other, her judgment of them and what they represent is uncompromising and severe.

“Home” is a book full of doubleness and paradox, at once serene and volcanic, ruthless and forgiving. It is an anguished pastoral, a tableau of decency and compassion that is also an angry and devastating indictment of moral cowardice and unrepentant, unacknowledged sin. It would be inaccurate to say that the novel represents yet another breathless exposé of religious hypocrisy, or a further excavation of the dark secrets that supposedly lurk beneath the placid surface of small-town life. When Robinson writes that “complacency was consistent with the customs and manners of Presbyterian Gilead and was therefore assumed to be justified in every case,” she is not scoring an easy, sarcastic point. There is real kindness and generosity in the town, and its theological disposition is accordingly tolerant and charitable. Reverend Boughton embodies this forgiving, welcoming spirit both in his dotage and in his prime. In his preaching days, Glory recalls, “he did mention sin, but it was rarefied in his understanding of it, a matter of acts and omissions so common­place that no one could be wholly innocent of them or especially alarmed by them, either — the uncharitable thought, the neglected courtesy. While on one hand this excused him from the mention of those aspects of life that seemed remotest from Sabbath and sunlight, on the other hand it made the point that the very nicest among them, even the most virtuous, were in no position to pass judgment on anyone else, not on the sly or the incorrigible, not on those who trouble the peace of their families, not on those who might happen to have gotten their names in the newspaper in the past week.”

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Lurking between these lines is the figure of Jack Boughton, who in his youth did nothing but trouble the peace of his family, and of other families as well. He was a thief, a truant and an all-around ne’er-do-well, whose crowning disgrace was getting a young farm girl pregnant and abandoning her and their child to a fate that could not be mitigated by the guilty charity of other Boughtons. Ames, in “Gilead,” remembers the young Jack as a mean-­spirited and wanton trickster, his transgressions motivated at best by the complete absence of any sense of responsibility and at worst by a pure and unaccountable malice. But old Boughton, whose love for his prodigal son never wavered even as it caused him endless grief, suspects that Jack’s bad behavior arose from a primal, unfathomable sense of estrangement. “I just never knew another child who didn’t feel at home in the house where he was born,” he says. “I always felt it was sadness I was dealing with, a sort of heavyheartedness.”

That sorrow is still evident in the 43-year-old Jack, who returns from his long time away with the cautious air of “a stranger unsure of his welcome.” He arrives hung over, but his evident alcoholism may only be the symptom of a deeper affliction, one that “Home” invites us to think about in explicitly theological terms. In “Gilead,” when Jack quizzed his father and Ames on the perennially tricky topic of predestination, Ames thought the younger man was mocking them. The scene is replayed in “Home,” with Glory anticipating an endless and fruitless doctrinal debate: “Ames and her father had quarreled over this any number of times, her father asserting the perfect sufficiency of grace with something like ferocity, while Ames maintained, with a mildness his friend found irksome, that the gravity of sin could not be gainsaid.” But there is nothing mischievous or provoking in Jack’s inquiry. When he asks “Do you think some people are intentionally and irretrievably consigned to perdition?” it is clear, to the reader, if not to his father, that he has a particular case — his own — in mind.

Nothing in the novel rules out the possibility that Jack might exist outside the grace of God, and that this spiritual condition, as much as any psychological disposition, might explain his loneliness and estrangement in the bosom of such a warm and blessed family. The apparent failure of two learned and serious ministers to hear the plain, earnest intent of Jack’s question is painful in itself, but it is also the sign of something larger. “Home” and “Gilead” are marvelous novels about family, friendship and aging. But they are great novels — or perhaps two installments in a single, as yet unfinished great novel — about race and religion in American life.

Ten years ago, Robinson published “The Death of Adam,” a collection of bracingly contrarian essays whose common thread was a defense of the Puritan intellectual and ethical tradition. Against the grain of much recent historiography — and in the teeth of a powerful literary tendency going back to the end of the 19th century — she defended John Calvin, Jonathan Edwards and their descendants against the usual charges of intolerance, prudery and parsimoniousness. Instead, she finds a tradition devoted to social justice, universal education and a chastening knowledge of human fallibility.

For Robinson, the political and moral apotheosis of this noble, misunderstood tradition was the abolitionist movement, among whose incidental achievements was the founding of towns like Gilead, a kind of garrison for militants fighting the spread of slavery in Kansas. John Ames is steeped in this local history — his grandfather was a zealot in the old, righteous antislavery cause — and Jack Boughton is aware of it, too. “Home again in Iowa, the shining star of radicalism,” he says, quoting Ulysses S. Grant. There is rueful irony there, as there is in nearly everything Jack says, but there is also something more: a sad acknowledgment of how far the town has fallen away from its founding spirit.

In 1956, the problem of race preoccupies no one in Gilead but Jack Boughton. He and his father watch the news from Montgomery, Ala. — “On the screen white police with riot sticks were pushing and dragging black demonstrators. There were dogs.” — but the reverend is unmoved: “In six months nobody will remember one thing about it,” he says. Later, he declares that “the colored people” are “creating problems and obstacles for themselves with all this — commotion.” He sees no particular connection between that distant commotion and local history, in which he takes little interest apart from observing that “there was a lot of what you might call fanaticism around here in the early days.”

There are other names for it, one of which might be moral courage. Jack’s failure to find any trace of that — and the inability of either Ames or Boughton to understand that it has been lost — is infuriating and finally heartbreaking. Readers who come to “Home” after “Gilead” will know that during his 20-year exile Jack met a black woman and had a child with her. His return to Gilead is in part a reconnaissance mission, an attempt to discover if the town might be a suitable home for a mixed-race family. In 1956, there are “no colored people in Gilead,” but it has not always been that way. They left after their church was burned, even though Ames remembers the arson as “a little nuisance fire” that happened long ago. And Ames’s “shabby old town” is a place where a black family is afraid to be out on the road when the sun goes down.

These ugly facts complicate the beauty of “Home,” but the way Robinson embeds them in the novel is part of what makes it so beautiful. It is a book unsparing in its acknowledgment of sin and unstinting in its belief in the possibility of grace. It is at once hard and forgiving, bitter and joyful, fanatical and serene. It is a wild, eccentric, radical work of literature that grows out of the broadest, most fertile, most familiar native literary tradition. What a strange old book it is.

HOME

By Marilynne Robinson

325 pp. Farrar, Straus & Giroux. $25

A. O. Scott is a film critic for The Times. He is writing a book about the American novel since World War II.

A version of this review appears in print on , on Page BR16 of the Sunday Book Review with the headline: Return of the Prodigal Son. Today's Paper|Subscribe